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Radical evil (German: das radikal Böse) is a phrase used by German philosopher Immanuel Kant, one representing the Christian term, radix malorum. Kant believed that human beings naturally have a tendency to be evil.
Kant’s account of radical evil demonstrates how evil can be a genuine moral alternative while nevertheless being an innate condition. Given the general optimism of the time, Kant’s view was revolutionary.
According to Kant, we become radically evil when we subordinate the moral law to our own self‐interest (prudence). He holds that we never do wrong for the sake of doing wrong but only for the sake of prudence or from inclinations to more limited goods.
In the Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), Arendt borrows Kant’s term ‘radical evil’ to describe the evil of the Holocaust. However, Arendt does not mean what Kant means by ‘radical evil’ (see section 2.2 for Kant’s view of radical evil).
Summary. Kant’s thesis that there is in human nature an innate, universal, inextirpable, and radical propensity to evil belongs to his attempt to choose fragments of (Christian) revelation and see if they cannot be seen to lead back to the religion of pure reason.
The first analyzes Kant's conception of radical evil and its connections with other features of his moral theory, particularly his rigorism. It also maintains that the roots of this conception are to be found in the Groundwork.
Finally, what is radical evil, and how does it differ from other kinds of evil? These are some of the key metaphysical questions that philosophers have raised concerning evil. The goal of this entry is to provide a taxonomy of the most prominent answers: the main theories of evil’s kinds and origins on offer in the western philosophical tradition.
